Who will win the war in Iran? Expert: “Imposing a time barrier to achieve all objectives is unjustified”
More and more military analysts, political scientists and security experts, including Americans, claim that Donald Trump took a risk when he decided to start the military operation against Iran. Romanian expert Hari Bucur Marcu has a different opinion.
US Air Force F35 fighter plane in action. PHOTO: Unsplash
The war in the Middle East seems to be going a little differently than the Americans expected, and Iran's response is much stronger than anticipated. During all this time, the allies of the United States of America in the Middle East received fierce blows, and Tehran's missiles and drones mainly hit American targets on their territory. This is why many voices, including across the Atlantic, claim that the Americans have not been able to protect their allies.
The connection between arithmetic and war
Among those who support these things are Robert Pape, former adviser to Barack Obama, and Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff at the State Department. In the online environment, polemics are at home, and experts and cynics alike dissect the situation in the Middle East.
Security policy expert Hari Bucur Marcu does not share the view of Trump's detractors and is of the opinion that the success of the military operation is only a matter of time.
“It is enough to be good at arithmetic to understand that hitting 15,000 targets in Iran cannot happen in one day, when an aircraft carrier can sustain 160 sorties in 24 hours (with a maximum of just over 200 sorties) and ground attack aircraft cannot have more than 3-4 sorties per day, totaling another 150 sorties, which allows United States to plan to strike 3-400 targets per day”says Hari Bucur Marcu.
Bombardments 3 times more intense than in the former Yugoslavia
The cadence of American shots is impressive. As noted by the expert, the air operation in Iran is more than three times more intense than the war in the former Yugoslavia. With the difference that then no less than 16 countries participated. Now, Hari Bucur Marcu specifies that he refers exclusively to the blows given by the Americans to Iran, without taking into account those applied by Israel.
“Mathematically, it would take 50 days to hit all planned targets, with 300 targets per day, or 40 days, with an average of 400 planned targets per day. Which is still an air operation with more than 3 times the intensity of the NATO war in the former Yugoslavia, 1999, when all 16 NATO nations at the time participated. And we're talking only about the United States, without arithmetically adding the effort of hitting targets by the IDF – For accuracy, I must mention that some targets require more than one hit, but also that for a single target, several aircraft are required, of which only one is the carrier of the target. Just as, in addition to air strikes, from aircraft, there can be targets on the ground (or at sea). hit by other means of attack, the most well-known of which are missiles and drones”, he says.
Why are there losses?
In such an operation, of such magnitude, losses were inevitable, draws attention to Hari Bucur Marcu. This does not mean, as some experts say, that the US is weak or that Iran is stronger.
“In addition, I should also mention that such a combined air operation (participating aircraft belonging to all categories of forces that have aviation, plus elements specific to cyber and space weapons) and coordinated between the two allied nations (the United States and Israel), could not be executed with minimal losses and with results beyond expectations, if it had not been planned in detail, for days and weeks, in compliance with the doctrine of target engagement, in the order of approved priority, with maximum hit probability and minimum cost,” explains Hari Bucur Marcu.
As such, with an operation of this magnitude it is difficult to fix a deadline by which it will produce the results envisaged by the planners. Hari Bucur Marcu again brings arithmetic as an argument in his support.
“It is clear from these observations based on arithmetic and common sense that the imposition of a time barrier to the achievement of all the objectives for which Operation Epic Fury was launched is completely unjustified, neither from a political nor from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the perspective of military art and science. For those who understand and accept this, it should be an occasion of embarrassment every time they hear a commentator speaking, just a month of a campaign characterized by such an intensity unimaginable just a few months ago, a commentator asserting with the guise of an illiterate or hardened propagandist that the campaign is “dragging”, that Iran would still be in control (because it still has ammunition, missiles and drones to launch), that America would not manage alone in the operational theater”. concluded Hari Bucur Marcu.
